The Ghosts of I-95 and How a Fatal Bus Crash Exposed America's Highway Fraud Machine
Part One of a 30-Day Investigation into US Highway Transportation Safety Failures
The twisted metal and shattered glass on Interstate 95 that March morning in 2011 told only part of the story. Fifteen passengers lay dead, their bodies torn apart when a vertical highway signpost sliced through their charter bus like a blade through paper. The driver who walked away from that carnage? He's free today, collecting a government paycheck from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority while the families of his victims remain buried in unmarked legal settlements.
Ophadell Williams “Singh's” journey from mass killer to MTA employee, and bail bondsman, according to Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and a News report where he actually saved some lives in 2022 at work for the MTA.
The World Wide Travel Crash showcases everything wrong with America's licensing of its commercial drivers and who is granted authority to operate as a fleet. It's a case study in regulatory capture, bureaucratic incompetence, and institutional fraud that transforms our highways into killing fields while the perpetrators, in many cases, walk free. We’re not talking about just the drivers who are often held accountable for their actions, but those who may encourage or pressure or fraudulently operate fleets or condone driver behavior and then walk away from fatal crashes that, in many cases, are caused by the failures of the company itself.
The National Transportation Safety Board's investigation revealed a web of deception so brazen it reads like fiction. Singh had been operating under multiple identities for years, accumulating violations faster than regulators could process them. The New York Department of Motor Vehicles issued him a Commercial Driver's License despite having 21 separate suspensions on record, eight of which remained active at the time of the crash.
Here's really where the story got criminal: those suspensions were hidden under an alias created when Singh gave police his middle and last name during traffic stops in the 1980s and 1990s. This may be a prime spot to address his name. There are no records of how Williams got or adopted the last name Singh, but that is what he is going by in 2025. When he applied for his first legitimate license in 1995, state officials never bothered to cross-reference the "header record" containing his violations. A simple database search that any competent bureaucrat could have performed in minutes would have revealed Singh as a habitual traffic violator who should never have been licensed to operate a bicycle, much less a 40-ton passenger bus.
The NTSB's forensic analysis painted a picture of criminal negligence. Singh had been awake for over 72 hours before the crash, his "sleep opportunities" limited to brief naps across bus seats between casino runs. Electronic control module data showed his bus traveling at 78 mph in a 50 mph zone for at least 10 seconds before impact. He never touched the brakes. Passengers reported the bus had been weaving over rumble strips for miles before the final catastrophic departure from the roadway.
"The driver was experiencing both acute sleep loss and cumulative sleep debt at the time of the accident," NTSB investigators concluded. "His lack of evasive braking or corrective steering action as the bus drifted off the roadway was consistent with fatigue-induced performance impairment."
Singh's employer, World Wide Travel of Greater New York, knew exactly what they were hiring. The company's post-accident compliance review revealed "inadequate safety oversight" and violations spanning years of operation. World Wide wasn't operating alone, they shared drivers, dispatchers, mechanics, and vehicles with a sister company called Great Escapes Tours & Travel, a classic shell game designed to evade federal oversight.
While the driver became the immediate focus of public outrage, the company’s leadership largely avoided direct accountability. Speaking publicly for the first time after the tragedy, owner Michael Shub defended World Wide Travel, insisting, “Everything was safe. The company was safe. It’s heartbreaking. It’s an accident that happened. Everyday I think about that day. No words can express what happened. I wish we can change it, but there is nothing we can change.” But regulators painted a very different picture. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that inadequate oversight by World Wide Travel’s management was a contributing factor in the crash, while FMCSA investigators uncovered widespread violations and systemic failures in vetting high-risk drivers. By June 2011, the carrier was ordered out of service with an “unsatisfactory” safety rating. Yet rather than disappear, the same ownership simply shifted operations to its “sister” company, Great Escapes Tours & Travel, which shared the same buses, drivers, and managers. In effect, the name on the side of the bus changed, but the leadership practices that enabled the tragedy did not.
While we touch on Chameleon Carriers in this story, we will spend several days on this topic with active 2025 carriers, including the one in the recent Florida U-turn crash, in the coming days. Great Escapes continued operating from the same Brooklyn garage with the same management, same drivers, and same dangerous practices. The FMCSA noted in compliance reviews that determining which company was actually running which trips required "deciphering" records because the operations were so thoroughly intermingled.
This corporate reincarnation racket isn't unique to World Wide Travel. It's standard operating procedure for an industry that treats safety violations like business expenses and dead passengers like acceptable losses.
The technical details of Singh's crash read like a blueprint for vehicular homicide. His 1999 Prevost motorcoach struck the guardrail at 64 mph, fast enough to trigger a rollover that compressed the roof and ejected passengers through shattered windows. The vertical highway signpost that ultimately killed 15 people entered the passenger compartment "along the base of the passenger windows" and traveled nearly the entire length of the bus, creating what investigators described as a "risk zone" where survival was impossible.
Had Singh been traveling at the posted 50 mph speed limit, NTSB simulations showed the bus would have remained upright and likely avoided the signpost entirely. The 14 mph difference between legal and actual speed wasn't a minor traffic violation; it was the mathematical difference between life and death for 15 people.
Singh's criminal trial became a masterclass in how the justice system protects killers when they wear the uniform of legitimate commerce. Despite overwhelming evidence of fatigue, speeding, and reckless operation, a jury acquitted him on all 15 counts of manslaughter in 2012. His defense attorney successfully argued that Singh had swerved to avoid a phantom tractor-trailer, a claim investigators definitively disproved through accident reconstruction and electronic data analysis.
The acquittal sent a clear message to every dangerous driver in America: kill people through negligence behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle, and the system will protect you. Singh disappeared from public view after his trial, leaving victims' families to pursue civil remedies while he rebuilt his life in comfortable anonymity.
Singh didn't disappear from transportation. News reports and his Facebook posts from 2022 show him employed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which was his past employer before the crash, the same agency responsible for moving 5 million New York area commuters daily on buses, trains, and ferries. The irony of a mass killer collecting taxpayer dollars while working in public transportation apparently escaped the notice of MTA human resources officials.
This is America's transportation safety system in its purest form. A revolving door between deadly crashes and continued employment, greased by regulatory corruption and bureaucratic indifference. Singh's story from 14 years ago has become the norm. Every day, drivers with hidden violations climb behind the wheel of commercial vehicles. Every day, motor carriers fraudulently receive operating authority. Some don't have names or addresses, and until a few months ago, they weren't even required to prove they were real people in the United States. With less than $1500 as a broker, you could get authority to operate and have access to any freight you could talk your way into. For the cost of a junk truck, $400, and an insurance down payment, you could have trucking authority from the FMCSA in 21 days. For a few thousand dollars or less, you could have almost immediate access to freight in the US with virtually no limits or oversight.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's own data reveals the scope of this carnage. Large truck and bus crashes kill over 5,000 people annually, with driver error contributing to 87 percent of fatal crashes. Yet the agency continues to issue medical certificates to drivers with disqualifying conditions, approve motor carriers with fabricated safety records, and allow state agencies to operate shadow licensing systems that bypass federal oversight entirely.
California's AB 60 license program has created an underground economy of non-domiciled commercial drivers operating without proper federal screening. Private, intrastate fleet exemptions from federal regs by each state can allow companies to put dangerous vehicles on public highways without the safety inspections required for federally regulated commercial carriers. Third-party CDL examiners take cash payments to pass candidates who can't read English traffic signs or perform basic vehicle inspections. Medical examiners are selling med certs to drivers who don't qualify due to medical fitness issues. Each loophole represents a profit opportunity for someone and a death sentence for someone else.
The families of Singh's victims received undisclosed settlements in civil court, their grief monetized and silenced by confidentiality agreements that protect the guilty while abandoning the innocent. The crash site on I-95 was repaired within weeks, the guardrail upgraded, and the signpost relocated. The system that created the conditions for mass murder remains largely unchanged, churning out new Singh-style operators every day while regulators collect their paychecks and look the other way.
The ghosts of Interstate 95 haunt more than just the families who lost loved ones that March morning. They haunt every American who shares the road with commercially licensed killers, every child who rides a school bus driven by someone with hidden seizure disorders, every commuter whose bus driver obtained his certificate through bribery rather than competence.
Singh's continued employment in public transportation in any capacity isn't just an insult to his victims; it's proof that the system designed to protect public safety instead protects the people who profit from its failure.
Over the next 29 days, we'll examine how this machine of death really operates, case by case, crash by crash, body by body, law by law. We'll name the states and agencies that enable it, the officials who profit from it, and the victims who pay for it with their lives. We'll expose the medical examiners and certification mills, the third-party testers who take bribes, the rogue, unsafe, and sometimes chameleon and fraudulent motor carriers, and what federal agencies and private groups are or are not doing about all of the fraud and corruption that embodies a considerable portion of the US transportation industry.